


Full of Unexpected Places

by Kurukami



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, Homage, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-25
Updated: 2015-04-25
Packaged: 2018-03-25 16:40:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3817540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kurukami/pseuds/Kurukami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Let's talk about four young siblings.  </p>
<p>Four young siblings taken out of war-torn London, in the blackened, bomb-broken, blacked-out height of the Blitz.  Four young siblings who find a wooden box, find a door that transports them to other worlds, that is bigger on the inside that it has any right to be.</p>
<p>Oh, wait, you think, you've heard this story before, haven’t you?  This is the one about the wardrobe and the witch and the lion, isn't it?</p>
<p>Well...</p>
<p>... no.</p>
<p>Not exactly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Full of Unexpected Places

Let's talk about four young siblings. 

Four young siblings taken out of war-torn London, in the blackened, bomb-broken, blacked-out height of the Blitz. Four young siblings who find a wooden box, find a door that transports them to other worlds, that is bigger on the inside that it has any right to be.

Oh, wait, you think, you've heard this story before, haven’t you? This is the one about the wardrobe and the witch and the lion, isn't it?

Well...

... no.

Not exactly.

Because there are stories and then there are _stories,_ and some of them bear passing familiarity to others, and some of them are _based_ on others. Think of how many times myths and tales and legends have shifted, altered, _smudged_ the finer details over the course of millennia. Sometimes to make a better story. Sometimes to heighten a moral.

Sometimes to hide a truth.

So, yes, there was a brave, wise, slightly reckless leader who would lay down his life in protection of others, if need be, though he would prefer to find a way out where nobody dies. All too often this leader might be painted by others as something dangerous, something predatory, a terrible fearsome thing that children might read bloodied tales about in their gramarye books.

And he is that, _can_ be that, if you happen to be the sort of creature who would harm those who’ve done no true wrongs. If that is the case, he might happen into _your_ story and trick you, turn your triumph against you and see all that you thought achieved cast down and defeated. Even if you thought him dead, still he might rise up again in golden light, like an aurora cast by the first glimmers of the new day, to return to the battlefield and defeat you, even when your victory seems assured.

If you were that sort of creature, well, one day he could just drop out of the sky and tear down your world. Perhaps a great deal of evil might have been averted by the mere threat of his presence.

Or perhaps not. Sometimes evil comes into a world regardless – through greed, through cruelty, through spite or malice, through disbelief that another might hold power enough to stop it.

But the thing is, you know, this leader isn’t exactly alone. In fact, in many of these stories there are also young companions along as well, youthful (and possibly naïve) adventurous types with upstanding moral character who have a drive to explore and discover, to save and preserve, to be valiant, and just, and gentle, and magnificent. And because this leader isn’t alone, well, a great many things which might seem impossible become, all of a sudden, achievable.

Quite often, when these stories are told, they happen in time outside of time, and so when they come to a proper breaking point – an interlude, a hiatus, a pause in the action, so they might say – then those youthful companions might be returned to the lives they once knew, and no more than a bare span of minutes might have passed. Nothing, it might seem, would have changed while they had been gone.

For them, however, these brave youthful companions, everything had changed. For they had grown and matured, faced challenges and enemies that peers of their own age couldn’t possibly begin to fathom. For them, the world they’d known had changed, was different, seemingly smaller. Each of them knowing, now, that there was so much _else_ just beyond the horizon. And inside, parts of each of them longed to return to that adventure, to once again find a truer purpose in standing against unjust tyrants and eldritch foes. 

Some of them might, one day. Others, well… people grow older, grow up, become even more the protagonists of their own stories and learn to lead all on their own.

But even if they can’t return, if they are denied another chance to go back to that other life that so captivated them, that enriched them to such an astonishing degree, they are forever changed. They look for cracks in the boundaries of the everyday, for impossible gaps that might have swallowed angels or devils or escaped prisoners, for riddles spoken in dire tones and otherworldly languages. They look for hidden treasures, hole-in-the-wall secrets, for hidden entrances to long-lost passageways, for shadowy nooks and shallow-looking niches that might be full of mysteries just waiting to be solved.

Because you can’t properly judge a place with the briefest of glances. You need to experience it, live inside it, run your fingers along its hidden surfaces, take in the details glimpsed from the corner of your eye as much as those you’re staring straight at. You need to take in the scent of a dozen different worlds and a hundred different cultures, share words and kindnesses and tales with individuals that might look just like you or like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Their stories might be not too different from yours, after all, or they might just differ in almost every particular. Where you might see a lion others might see an oncoming storm, where you see a professor others might see a doctor, but certain things will always remain constant.

There is a box, and its doors open into strange locales, and it is bigger on the inside than it appears from without.

And it is full of unexpected places.

**Author's Note:**

> This work owes a great deal of its existence to **dirgewithoutmusic** 's amazing, _amazing_ [Narnia fics](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dirgewithoutmusic/pseuds/dirgewithoutmusic/works?fandom_id=287734). (Her (?) other fic, too, but those in particular.) They inspired me with their structured insightful analysis, their intuitive eloquence, and the poetry of the prose. I can only hope that I managed, here, to cast a pale shadow of what I took away after reading them.


End file.
